Notebook

He received it late last year: the date is written on the first page, in a cursive hand in thick, blank ink: 16th November, 2007. He was not the kind of person who could become attached to a material object – he was one among his friends who did not mourn the loss of handling cassettes and CDs; he liked, he said, the efficiency and convenience of MP3 – but it fit nicely into his waist pouch, so he took it when he travelled.

There were notes from that weekend she gave it to him, first few clipped sentences of a hand that had kept a diary as a child and teenager but had long since preferred to pen thoughts onto the computer (or as Drafts on cellphone if it came to it). In "Notes" after December there was the email ID of the girl from the hostel he had spent an evening chatting with, the full postal address of the elderly man whom he had hitched a ride with through the mountains once, written in their own hand. Fading coffee stains on some pages, from jotting notes on long afternoons sitting down to a quick cup before setting off again. Moments transcribed then forgotten about, thoughts stowed safely away. He flipped through to September now before finding a blank page.

In time he had grown fond of writing in it. Entries became longer, arrows ran back and forth through some of them. Paragraphs are still fleshed out on computer – cut-and-paste and all that – but two weeks ago he was telling her that some thoughts – "those bursting, in-the-moment ones" – he preferred to record in this diary, even when he was in his room using the laptop. He liked that he had to hold it close as he wrote, on a bus or train, or in a dark room in a new city, the palm holding up its tiny dimensions as the fingers tightly clasped the ball-point pen spilling across the page. He even began to see what his friends missed in MP3 that they had with cassette covers and CD jackets - with his diary he could turn the pages, feel their thickness, sometimes running his hand across a page he had just filled…

In a month or two his year would finish, he would go back home, and he would reach the end of this notebook too. He thought of this moment, the diary reaching its end just as his year was, notes from that first trip a few weekends after leaving home to, perhaps, notes made straining the eyes on the journey back to Madras in a couple of months' time. He felt sometimes he would look back on this year, his twenty-sixth, as the year he came of age. And this little black notebook, sitting on the table in his tiny lodgings or tucked into his waist pouch when he travelled, always at hand, was there with him through it.